Barbie and Ruth

  Back in March, Stacy Cordery  made a comment that stuck with me: “As a classroom professor and a woman’s biographer, it had been clear to me for years that female entrepreneurs are largely missing from history. Most of us can name at least a handful of Gilded Age or Progressive Era captains of industry…

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Strangers in the Land

I ended Asian-American Heritage Month with a Big Fat History Book: Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. Michael Luo started thinking about writing such a history in the fall of 2016. He and his family were standing in front of a restaurant in Manhattan when a…

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They Called Us Enemy

And now, I return to the Japanese internment camps in World War II,* this time in the form of George Takei’s graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy, written in collaboration with Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott and artist Harmony Becker.** Jumping back and forth in time,*** They Called Us Enemy tells the story of the camps…

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